A new portrait of the Milky Way's neighbor, Andromeda, shows our twin galaxy in a whole new light thanks to a new instrument on Japan's Subaru telescope at the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea.

The instrument, called the Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC), provides sharp images of the cosmos across a wide field of view. The new photo demonstrates that the HSC camera makes good on its promise of offering his-resolution views of objects throughout the telescope's large 1.5-degree field of view.

"This first image from HSC is truly exciting," Masahiro Takada, chair of the HSC science working group at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan, said in a statement. "We can now start the long-awaited, largest-ever galaxy survey for understanding the evolutionary history and fate of the expanding universe."

At only 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda, also known as M31, is the closest spiral galaxy to Earth, and is thought to be similar to our own galaxy. This bright galaxy is visible as a faint splotch on the sky to the naked eye, and was first written about in 964 A.D. by the Persian astronomer al-Sufi. The Subaru Telescope snapped this new image of Andromeda as part of its process to check out the HSC instrument before it is open for scientific use. [How to Find Andromeda] ...more